In the Elizabethan era, and even later, inhabitants of the northern counties were regarded by dwellers in the south as people among whom it would be dangerous for them to go. {94}English navigators were entering on voyages of discovery and conquest in distant seas, where they would fearlessly encounter the enemies of England or the Indians of the New World, at a time when their fellow-countrymen at home would have shrunk from the perils of a journey across the wilds of Northumberland or of an encounter with the supposed savages of Lancashire. Even when it was a matter of visiting friends, journeys to distant parts of the country were but rarely undertaken. In the "Gentleman's Magazine" for December, 1752, it was remarked that English people were readily going to France, where they spent in 1751 nearly £100,000; but though a rich citizen in London who had relatives or friends in the west of England might hear of their welfare half a dozen times in his life, by post, "he thinks no more of visiting them than of traversing the deserts of Nubia." On the other hand, one result of this limitation in the facilities for home travel was to give to many a county town a far greater degree of social distinction that it can claim to-day. Just as in mediæval times England had consisted of so many separate self-governing and self-dependent communities, each with the house of the lord of the manor as the "hub" of its own little universe, so--in the days when communications had certainly, though still only relatively, improved--did the county town become the recognised centre of social life and movement for each and every county where there was any pretence to social life at all. The country gentry, with their wives and daughters, came to regard a visit to the county town, and indulgence there in a round of balls, feasts, visits and functions, in the same light as a season in London is regarded at the present date. London in the seventeenth century, if not even down to the middle of the eighteenth, was, for all practical purposes, as far away from the western counties of England as London to-day is from Vienna or St. Petersburg. Visits to the Metropolis were then, indeed, of extremely rare occurrence. In Macaulay's sketch of "The State of England in 1685," forming chapter iii. of his "History of England," there is a diverting account of what must have happened to the lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor when he appeared in Fleet Street, to be "as easily distinguished from the resident population {95}as a Turk or a Lascar," and to be subjected to numerous "vexations and humiliations" until, enraged and mortified, he returned to his mansion where "he was once more a great man, and saw nothing above himself except when at the assizes he took his seat on the bench near the judge, or when at the muster of the militia he saluted the Lord Lieutenant."